<html><body>American Enterprise Institute<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The Struggle for Fallujah: An Insider s Account <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> October 12, 2005<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Frederick Kagan:  Ladies and gentlemen, let me welcome you to our discussion of a wonderful and extremely timely book, The Struggle for Fallujah: An Insider s Account, by Bing West, who joins us here today to talk about it with us.  <o:p></o:p> Bing has an enormous amount of experience to bring to bear on this project, which is one of the reasons I think it s so excellent.  I m not going to recount his whole bio for you you have it available.  Suffice it to say, he served in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Vietnam</st1:country-region></st1:place> with the Marines.  He served in the Reagan Administration.  He has written far too many books to list, recounting battle and the struggle of American soldiers and Marines to overcome their enemies.  He s just produced yet another terrific account of the two battles of Fallujah.  <o:p></o:p> One of the things that I think is terrific about this account is that it s not just a front-line, blood and guts, then we kicked the door down and there were enemies all around kind of book although there s a lot of that in it too.  But there s also a very deep understanding of the context and the complexities.  I hope we ll be able to address both parts of that today.<o:p></o:p> So without further ado, I ll turn it over to Bing to tell us a little bit about the book and what lessons he thinks we should draw from it.<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  Thank you, Fred.  What I ll do is just keep my opening remarks brief and then we can just chat back and forth.<o:p></o:p> Starting with, what was the methodology and why this book?  Thirty-five years ago in 001, and I came back from Vietnam, my squad and I Corps, we lost we went in with fifteen, we came out with seven or eight.  So we lost about half of us killed in this one village.  I happened to write another book and some people I was talking with in <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:State> said, Why don t you write about what happened in that one village?  I did, and it was called The Village, and it just recounted what we did for 485 days, fifteen Marines living with 5,000 Vietnamese, and what happened to each of us.  <o:p></o:p> Then the first review came out, which taught me an awful lot about writing books.  It was Kirkus Review and it said, Captain West, now with the RAND Corporation, alleges that his squad lived in a Vietnamese village for over a year.  The question is, why didn t he write about all the My Lais?   That was the review.  That s when I learned that no matter how much time you spend writing a book, the average book reviewer has gone to Bennington College and is a wonderful young lady of about 27 years of age who votes a little bit to the left of Kerry, and has nothing in common with writing about combat or writing from a different frame of reference then or today.  So I doubt if I know it s too gory, no matter what I do with it will run too many reviews.  They simply won t review it.<o:p></o:p> But I started to write it because I went to this General Mattis my prior book had been with him, when he was going out to Baghdad and said, Jim, as long as you re going into Fallujah, and I ve been there a few times, what I d like to do because we had talked about setting up combined action platoons I d like to just spend a year with one of the platoons, get to know them, get to know them really well, and see what happens in Fallujah over a year.  Just like I did with The Village.   Mattis said, Sounds like a good idea, Bing.   And the rest was history.<o:p></o:p> It taught me an enormous amount, because this book had absolutely it taught me that if you re an investigator on the ground, all your hypotheses are going to go out the window when you confront the facts long enough.  So the book ended up totally different than the reasons for starting to write it.<o:p></o:p> So what is the book then?  The book is based on three years because I began in 2003 going to Fallujah it s based on three years with eight trips, embedded with 17 battalions and watching them, being with them in the fights, and then interviewing about 700 that I actually had the names of maybe another thousand.  Gradually what emerged, which would happen to anybody if you spend that much time in one city that is only 5 kilometers by 5 kilometers teeny city and it s laid out just like New York, with a perfect north-south/east-west gridline, and there are 300,000 people but really closer, I think, to 200,000 people they get to know you and you get to know them.  So at the end, just like I learned in the Vietnamese village, by the time this book was over, I knew the guys on the other side and they knew me.  <o:p></o:p> In fact, two of them have sent me several missives because they re upset with this book coming out, because they thought I was going to portray them wrong.  I thought that was interesting.  I was talking to Tom Ricks and he said, I don t find that that dismaying.   We re in this information world and why shouldn t some of these other people who pay attention to literature be very concerned if somebody s going to be writing about the battle from the other perspective?  So one of them offered to meet with me in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Syria</st1:country-region></st1:place>.  I thought, that s the last time I come back from <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Syria</st1:country-region></st1:place>.  The other one offered a city of my choice but the only way I d do it would be to bring thirteen of my favorite friends from the Marine Corps with me to either one of them.  <o:p></o:p> But it does show the degree to which, when you get down in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>, it s really personal.  It is not impersonal if you spend any particular amount of time there.<o:p></o:p> So in the book, what I tried to do was explain what happened in this small city over three years.  I do believe there are great changes.  And then explain what the Americans were trying to do, what the insurgents were trying to do.  Then I was very fortunate in having access all the way up the chain.  The only two people whom I did not speak to I didn t speak to the president, because I didn t think he d really say too much to me, but I interviewed everybody else except General Abizaid.  He was the only one who refused to speak to me.  But every other principal up and down the chain of command, I spent quite some time about.<o:p></o:p> What I tried to do is show what happened at the strategic level and how that affected the insurgency, and how it caused a disaster at Fallujah, and what was happening at the bottom.  Because I m astounded at the bravery that was shown on that battlefield by Americans, and as long as we have that spirit we re okay, but I m really worried how long you can hang onto that spirit if it s always a divided country.  <o:p></o:p> But I try to lay out in great detail what the fighting was all about, because in the end, if we re all professional critics if you spend anywhere near as much time critiquing football as we do <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>, you d spend a little time understanding how they play football.  In all due deference, we spend so much time at a policy level in Iraq but we don t have a clue what the fighting is really all about.  I think what I tried to do in the book is rectify that a little bit by staying with the squads and saying, Hey guys, these are the basics.  From this you can draw some conclusions or not.<o:p></o:p> The overall three conclusions that I came away with overall and then I ll shut up and we ll just talk is, first, insurgency.  It s a Sunni-based insurgency now led by jihadists and we d better just recognize that.  The analogy I use is this is like if you had seized <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Richmond</st1:place></st1:City> in a shock and awe campaign in 1862 and declared that the Confederacy was over.  No one with common sense would have believed it.  So we got a problem here and we don t want to admit it yet.<o:p></o:p> The second is that on a strategic level, we established two chains of command in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> and that was wrong.  It was just nutty.  Having Ambassador Bremer as the envoy with a portfolio from the White House that included the monies, the policy and the training for the Iraqi armed forces, and having the Central Command with our fighting forces responsible for carrying out the day-to-day security until this other force was ready under an entirely different chain of command with an entirely different strategy you would not do that with any company in the United States of America.  We did that like that and never looked back at it, and no one has ever said, Wait, let s look systemically at what we ve done trying to run two chains of command.<o:p></o:p> Lastly, as I alluded to, the valor of our troops has really pulled us out.  You don t need brilliant strategists when you re going to win every battle unfortunately, because it always lets the higher guys off the hook to a certain extent.  But the valor of our troops will stand scrutiny against any generation I would argue, probably put to shame any other generation and yet we have a framework now that works so that we spend 90 percent of the time on the Abu Ghraibs and maybe 1 percent on the valor.  <o:p></o:p> I don t get that, but that s a cultural shift in our country that we d better be damned careful of.  For the Senate of the United States to vote 91 senators saying, hey, we got to put down certain regulations because these troops are running amok just strikes me as being absolutely wrong and not understanding what s going on in the countryside.<o:p></o:p> Tom Donnelly:  Tell us how you really feel.<o:p></o:p> Bing, I want to draw you out.  I think your three issues are worth delving into in some detail, and I ll just take the first one and try to get you to talk a bit more about the enemy, as it were.  Obviously in Fallujah, as you say, it got personal and you got up close to these guys.<o:p></o:p> On the other hand, just yesterday the Administration released the full text of the Zawahiri-to-Zarqawi letter.  I think it s very consistent with the picture that you re trying to portray, that the struggle really is within the Sunni community.  Again, the interesting thing to sort of summarize my reading of that letter is that these guys are hardly ten feet tall; that there are big divisions within the Sunni community; and that some of the excessive violence that goes with the Zarqawi way of warfare is counterproductive from the enemy s point of view, in the sense that the beheadings and all that kind of stuff isn t necessarily winning the hearts and minds of every Iraqi and certainly every Sunni.<o:p></o:p> But again, you were there, and if you re at all familiar with the letter or have seen any of the reports on it, I wonder if you can connect that sort of as it were, the grand strategic view of the enemy and connect that with what you see on the tactical level, obviously in a place like Fallujah.<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  I just read the New York Times synopsis of the letter this morning.  I think we always have to start with just where we are, rather than coulda/shoulda/woulda relative to where we were.  But today the insurgency those who want to kill Americans in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>, by and large, fall into the jihadist camp.  They are not nationalists fighting for a cause or against the occupiers.  Every single time that you re in a firefight, the first thing you hear is, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.   In fact, it s a good tip-off.  It gives us an idea of where to throw the grenades.<o:p></o:p> Islam, to put it charitably, was hijacked over the last three years.  I do not have great respect for most Sunni clerics who have this refractory attitude that everything is screwed up, go forth, do damage, and then they re very careful of how they put the words so that if we have microphones there, they cannot be arrested for sedition.  But since we let everyone go anyway, most of them do indulge in sedition.  They get these kids who have nothing else a seventeen-year-old kid is given his water, he s given his food he can t have sex, he doesn t have booze, he doesn t have music, he doesn t have any what we consider normal outlets.<o:p></o:p> Tom Donnelly:  He has no future as a Marine, is what you re saying.<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  He goes to the mosque and he hears nothing but it s legitimate to be opposed to the occupation.  The one thing he has is an AK-47.  You give me a seventeen-year-old kid with an AK-47 and nothing else, and somebody spewing that garbage all the time, and you got a problem.  Then you end up having to kill all of them, because they re not on a league with the Marines.  <o:p></o:p> The Marine nickname for them is knuckleheads, and a-holes.   They don t respect them as fighters.  They just shoot them when they come out there.  They re being fed this stuff all the time.  This stuff about the Ba athists being in charge or something, I believe that s gone now.  I watched in Fallujah when we brought back these generals who claim, We re the generals, we can get in charge here they were ridden out of town on a rail by the imams within two months.  The person who has more power in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Iraq</st1:country-region></st1:place> than anybody else by far is that bastard Zarqawi, because he has murdered so many people and on such a scale that he now is the new little Saddam.  <o:p></o:p> Everyone in <st1:country-region w:st="on">Iraq</st1:country-region> was scared to death in April of 2003 when we were rolling up to <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Baghdad</st1:place></st1:City>.  I tell you they were scared, because they couldn t believe anyone could really kill Saddam.  They really believed that he was bigger than the devil.  Zarqawi is beginning to take on that same kind of aura.  <o:p></o:p> In my judgment, this is a fight to the death.  It may not have been at some point, but it is now.  Whoever wrote the president s last speech for him, it s about time they began to say some of that, because it s true and every guy on the battlefield knows it.  This thing is religious-based in a way that we don t like.  The Sunnis are so angry about us taking their power away from them that the waves of hostility I m just back from Fallujah and Ramadi two weeks ago.  <o:p></o:p> I ll tell you, you walk into the marketplace among hundreds of people, and I said to the lieutenant-colonel, Joe Latois, Hey, Joe, will you take me to the market?   He said, Sure, come on, Bing.   So we went down to the market.  I said, I want to take some pictures because it looks much cleaner than the last time I was here.   I was there in November.  He said, Sure, go out and take some pictures.   <o:p></o:p> The minute I got out, I look around, and there are eight of my best friends, all of them on all sides of me looking at the crowds.  Here I am in the middle of these big eight Marines, and Joe says, Take all the pictures you want.   I said, Do you mind getting out of the picture?   He said, I can t do that, you re liable to get clipped.   And everyone s there glaring and I m saying, Smile!   Couldn t resist it.<o:p></o:p> I thought, that s classic, because they have the power they re able to move but it s like a phalanx moving, and you know that everyone there either dislikes you or hates you, somewhere on that scale.<o:p></o:p> We went back to the base that night.  I was staying with our advisors out in town.  They had barbed wire around their house.  The poor guy next to us had just been shot three times in the head and executed.  His mistake was number one, he was a Kurd.  They told him to get out of town.  Why?  Because he lived next to the Iraqi soldiers that had moved in and they had seen him smiling at the soldiers.  The soldiers cannot buy a Coke.  No way they can buy a Coke.  One soldier made the mistake of going over the wire I mean, from here to that window, going over the wire to get his hair cut before he went on leave.  Pow, somebody shot him in the head.<o:p></o:p> So you are living in a community that know who the killers are among them and wouldn t turn in any of those killers.  That s just a fact of life today in the Sunni areas.  I have my own theories about how it s going to be broken, but I don t believe we re going to see any political epiphany this weekend.  I don t care how they vote.  You re not changing the attitude of those Sunnis because they don t believe they ve been defeated yet.  You can t be rehabilitated if you still don t believe you ve done anything wrong.<o:p></o:p> Tom Donnelly:  If I could just quickly follow up, so you don t really distinguish between fear and outright hatred on the part of the average Fallujan, if there s even such a creature.  It s outright, undifferentiated hatred of Americans.  Is it just Americans or is it again, one thing that s notable in the Zawahiri letter is it says, okay, we need to get the Americans out and then we will turn on the Shi a and the rest of our enemies.  So it s definitely a prioritization but their list of enemies doesn t end with Americans, that s for sure.<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  After they killed the guy next door, I was standing there with the advisors.  The advisors said to me we re all buddies What do you think we should do, sir?   I said, You better do something.  You d better not stay here.   They said, All right, we re going to roust the town.  We re going to get downtown.   He said to me, You ve got any favorite targets?   I said, Yeah, let s go back to the terror house, the torture house.   A terrible place I had been before.  They said, Fine.   <o:p></o:p> So they looked on a map.  These are all Iraqis, only two Americans.  Everyone else is Iraqi.  We whipped down there.  The Iraqis have improved dramatically now that they ve been with the Americans, the Iraqi soldiers.  They walked in there with the swagger of Marines, into this bad area, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Jolan</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Park</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>.  I had my computer.  I m looking with the Iraqis, with this interpreter.  I said, How s this area?   He said, I d last one minute if I didn t have twelve of us here.  I wouldn t last a minute.  They hate me as much as they hate you.   Then he shrugged and said, But I m Shi a.   He just automatically accepted it.<o:p></o:p> So we looked at this house and he said, That s the house.   So we went in and immediately the owner said, I don t know whose house this is.   Then we went down this corridor which was awful, the mold it had been awful with the stench of death and what they were doing in that.  All of a sudden it was clean, white walls.  I said, What s the deal?   The interpreter turned around and said something, and the man s face just lit up and he said, Oh, you want the torture house.  This is the wrong house.  It looks just like it but it s next door.   <o:p></o:p> And he goes running out and rats out his neighbor, and bangs on his door and says, They want to talk to you about the torture house, and then he takes off running.  This guy walks out, and I m looking at the picture, and it s a brand-new house.  He said, Oh, the Marines ripped it down.   I said, Yeah, right, I walked through it.   So then we start down.  I was asking a few other questions.  I said, They couldn t have torn it down, and I showed him the next picture.  Oh, maybe that happened later.   I said, What about the torture cells?   No torture cells.   <o:p></o:p> So I show him this poor guy who had his legs cut off.  Oh, that s my brother!   I said, Your brother?   Yes, my brother used to kill people, so I kept him in the cell so he couldn t kill people.   Oh.  So I said, What about the next guy?   And I showed him the next cell.  Well at this particular point, the interpreter says to me, Sir, if we spend any more time with him, they re going to kill him.  We got to get out of here. <o:p></o:p> So we walked farther down the street and asked some other questions.  As we re doing that, I couldn t resist.  I had my trusty camera, and my trusty guards, and here come three schoolgirls about this high, and when they pass this house, it was just like when you pass the graveyard and your mother has told you that s where the boogeyman are all three of them went like that, and I caught the picture of them.  But as far as the people were concerned, that was the crazy brother that they had there.<o:p></o:p> So how much of that is intimidation?  A heck of a lot.  But it s so pervasive that no one well, I take that back.  There are some cracks now that for the first time I saw we were brought out to one sheikh s house.  We get out there in the dead of night, because if you go during the daytime he s going to be killed.  We get there and the other thing of course about <st1:country-region w:st="on">Iraq</st1:country-region> is, <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> is total garbage, huh?  Total garbage.  There s no such thing as commonweal, nobody will pick up anything, anywhere.  You can never get them to do it.  The minute you go behind the courtyard wall, it is immaculate, because that s the private space.  The public space, nobody cares about.  They have no common sense of the commonweal.  <o:p></o:p> So we go behind this wall and it is boffo.  I mean, I am now in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Palm Beach</st1:place></st1:City>.  I m thinking, wow, how s this guy going to live?  He starts the negotiations with the colonel and he says, you know, you ve got all these Marines and they scare the hell out of my guys.  Can we have this agreement?  They re trying to kill me.  <o:p></o:p> They ve been down here twice with suicide bombers.  We can take care of our own neighborhood.  Will you let us have I think he wanted 50 AKs with licenses to have them.  And you agree, you and I will have a certain rule that your Marines won t go across, because you guys just kill everybody.  So they made the agreement and I realized, this is a real chip, because this guy knows he s going to die on the other side but he s strong enough that he thinks with 50 AKs he can take care of himself.  That told me the other side isn t that tough, as opposed to a year ago.  Opposed to a year ago, a couple thousand of them.  Now one guy with 50 AKs thinks he s okay.<o:p></o:p> Frederick Kagan:  Bing, you raised a lot of interesting points there that I d like to follow up on.  Who s the enemy here for them?  Because we run around, we ll telling everybody and we re telling ourselves that the problem is that there are Americans in Iraq and we re stirring all this up and we need to have a light footprint because whenever there s American troops, everybody gets mad.  But it seems pretty clear that when the Iraqi government troops show up, people get pretty mad about that too.  The situation, I think, is a lot more complicated than what we ve been telling ourselves.  It s very telling that the soldier that you were with was Shi a.  I wonder how many of the people who were with him were Shi ite and how they all felt about it.<o:p></o:p> Related to that, it s interesting apparently when you talk to Sunni Arabs in the north about what s going on and the troops that are coming in, they ll say, They re Kurds, they re all peshmerga.  That s what they ll tell you.  You say, what are they?  No, that s just a peshmerga unit.  A lot of times when you go back, it s not true.  They are Kurds, they re not necessarily peshmerga.  They re certainly not entire peshmerga units, because they weren t brought in that way.  But that kind of exaggeration is what you get.<o:p></o:p> So I m interested in what you think about what these Iraqis actually see as the enemy and how significant actually the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> is as their enemy compared to the Iraqi government and all of its manifestations.<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  The Kurds and the Shi ites that are in the armed forces more and more because finally General Petraeus and General Casey partnered every one of them up with an American battalion are beginning to get a swagger to them, which I think is very healthy.  They re beginning to think, I can handle this.  Not all the way yet, because they always like the fact that that American is there, he s going to be somewhere near. <o:p></o:p>  But they re getting much better.  As they get this swagger, they become more blunt about what they ll say, which basically of course every Kurd will tell you, Hey, come on up to Kurdistan, it s cool.  We ll have a great time, we ll have to have you in my house.  They re our best friends.  The Shi ites are a little bit more standoffish, but the ones that you meet in the army like our soldiers and Marines so much that they keep saying, Come on down south, we don t have these problems.  They universally agree the problem are the Sunnis.<o:p></o:p> The Sunnis would universally agree they re the problem, because gosh darn it, we ve taken away their birthright.  For five hundred years they ve dominated this place and why shouldn t they dominate it for another five hundred years?  Who are we to go sticking our nose in there?  And since 21 of the 23 other Islamic nations in the neighborhood are Sunni, there s an underlying sympathy for this in many different ways.<o:p></o:p> The Sunnis on the other hand, by and large, honestly have their heads in the sand.  They are not long-term thinkers.  They re just angry.  They re always stirred up by the imams and they re extremely negative about everything.  They don t have a solution for it themselves.  They re perfectly willing to tolerate the insurgency, as well as maybe being afraid.  That kind of a situation, what I envision gradually you re going to see is an army of occupation that is much more the Iraqi army, which is 90 percent Shi a.  <o:p></o:p> The Iraqi army, the Shi as, are going to be sitting on top of the Sunni cities.  The next step is going to be gradually the police which right now are terrible.  The police in the Sunni areas, totally ineffective.  Poor guys have to stay alive and therefore they don t mess with the insurgents, otherwise they d be killed.  Gradually the police somehow have to improve.  But it s going to be years until the Sunnis accept all right, I m a minority in a democracy.  They re not there yet.  I think they have this silly hope that somehow the insurgency will fight us to a draw and things will be better for the Sunnis.  <o:p></o:p> Whereas I think the jihadists really are the dominant force in the insurgency.  They do have this pan-Arab view of the world.  No doubt in my mind, if they ever did win there, things would be a lot worse for us in an awful lot of other places.  But I don t give them too much chance of winning.  You give us a couple more years, I think there s an inevitability about this.<o:p></o:p> Tom Donnelly:  Let s open it up.  I think we can avoid the whole microphone routine, it s a small enough crowd that I think everybody can be heard.  But please remember the ground rules: identify yourself, and please try to ask a question rather than make a statement.<o:p></o:p> Question:  [inaudible], NTV.  Two very brief questions. First one& <o:p></o:p> [no audio for two minutes: microphones not used by speakers]<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  ...fracture a country into three different regimens, I see no reason to do that.  If you believe in a democracy, then you keep together.  I don t see that the Iraqis themselves you see a lot of shifting back and forth, but inherently I believe the Iraqis, left to their own devices over time, would stay together.  Maybe with the possible exception of the Kurds, but the Kurds know there are limits to how far they can go with their desires for autonomy.<o:p></o:p> Tom Donnelly:  I am told by a higher authority that we must use the microphone for the purposes of the transcript, which is important.  I will defer to Fred to run the meeting from here out.  I m now in a snit.<o:p></o:p> Frederick Kagan:  Okay.  Frank?<o:p></o:p> Frank Hoffman:  Frank Hoffman with the Marine Corps.  Bing, it s a follow-up on the I have a quote from your current comments.  Yesterday you were quoted as saying that only brute force is going to win this thing.  Today you said it s a fight to the death.  So how flippant is it to kill them all ?  What is the solution?  What are the limits of kinetic force in the Sunni triangle?<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  This is like saying we re in a war.  Wars are a function of killing until the other side does not want the death and destruction anymore and agrees to your political terms.  That s the definition of any war. We re going to continue to fight these jihadists in a death struggle.  They re not going to surrender and suddenly see the light.  They genuinely will use suicide bombers, as you ve seen on an enormous scale.  They genuinely believe in the rightness of their cause.  They ll continue and we re going to have to continue.<o:p></o:p> That s where I hope in the book to a certain extent that people will begin to understand something about the nature of fighting.  We always get to the policy level and no one really spends time and says, how does the fight really occur?  What really happens?  Those Marines in Fallujah were fighting at ten feet, in individual rooms.  Because before we went in when we went in in April, they were fighting on the streets as gangs.  You would move down a street and they d be shooting at you, and then because all the Marines are in heavy armor which really works, by the way; that really does stop a bullet they move much faster.  <o:p></o:p> So they had mobility, the Marines had armor.  Therefore it became a chess game down the streets as to who was going to move where in order to try to cut somebody off.  Most of it was dismounted.  Therefore you had to figure how long you could go before you needed more water, on both sides.  I d love to be able to sit down with some of them and say, How many heat casualties did you have at the end of today? <o:p></o:p> But that was a running gun battle.  Most of the fights were taking place at about 100-200 yards.  Most of the time you d see somebody, it would be one thousand one, one thousand two, and that would be about it.  So you weren t fighting people who wanted just to run and die.  Everyone wanted to stay alive on that battlefield.<o:p></o:p> When gradually the Marines began to move across it, we bumped into one house where the first Marine through the door, Corporal Amaya [phonetic], who wanted to be a comedian in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Las Vegas</st1:place></st1:City> his point man was having trouble with his flashlight and you had to use the flashlights to go in because it was all dark.  So he said, I ll go first.  He walked in and the last thing we heard him yell was, Shit, shit!   Then that was it, and then he went down, and he was hit.  Those Marines fought in that house for six hours trying to dig out who was in there, shooting tank rounds and everything else.  They finally just burned the house to the ground.<o:p></o:p> That was a warning.  What happened later when we went in in November was that I estimate there were about 2,500 to 3,000 fighters in the city.  All the civilians had left.  There was something like 200 civilians left in the entire city of <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Fallujah</st1:place></st1:City> when the battle took place.  They had 30,000 houses.  So a group of them, I think it was between 800 and 1,500, began to play a shell game.  <o:p></o:p> In the interviews and interrogations later, what the leaders were saying to them was, The Americans will never come into the room after you.  If they cannot use their superior firepower, they re not going to come into the room after you.  So they had 30,000 houses and the average house had about 10 rooms.  They had 300,000 hiding places.  Systematically, 100 Marine squads over the course of 15 days searched 30,000 houses.  So every squad, every day, was searching over 70 houses.  You get up in the morning at about 0800 and you start in for the day on line, and you go house by house by house.  Then you d rotate who was first in the door.  <o:p></o:p> Well, that s like playing Russian roulette to a certain extent, because you know they re behind some doors, you just don t know which doors.  Ready for this?  One hundred Marine squads had 200 firefights inside rooms.  After a while, you got certain tip-offs.  If all the windows had tape over them and drapes over them, and if all the doors were sealed underneath, you became very suspicious.  What they re trying to do is keep the light down to a minimum at all times, day and night.  Sometimes you could see where somebody had gone to the bathroom, and sometimes you d come across dead dogs.  They would kill the dogs, because the dogs in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> bark at everybody, not just one person or another.  So if you found dead dogs, you also had to be careful.<o:p></o:p> But then ultimately, because you couldn t just blow up everything, some Marine would have to open up that door and walk in.  Every single squad had at least two firefights where somebody would walk in a door and boom! somebody s shooting at them.  I think the amazing thing is we did lose 70 killed.  I think the amazing thing is it was that low, because the training was so good.  Then they d flood it right away.  You never left one guy in that doorway.  <o:p></o:p> The minute the firing started or anything, three or four would go in and try to pour in the amount of fire.  But they were fights, General, from you to me and less than that.  I had a couple of fights where the first sergeant I had a first sergeant right here, and he was shooting at an insurgent, and then I had a corporal and the corporal was shooting at another insurgent, and kept thinking, I have to be hitting him he s right there.  Then it turns out that he had so many amphetamines in him that he was moving even with it all.<o:p></o:p> But 100 squads, 200 fights, nobody knows about it.  I get a little upset that we focus on the bad instead of can you imagine the bravery, when you think of it?  If one police unit in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> had one fight against a gang in one room in all due deference, I like the police we d hear about it.  Two hundred of those fights took place.  That was the nature of it, because that s how they wanted to fight.  <o:p></o:p> But that was the last time that happened, Frank.  Since Fallujah, the word basically has gone out among the insurgents don t stand and fight the Americans.  That s why you re getting many more IEDs.<o:p></o:p> Frederick Kagan:  Frank, you had a follow-up?<o:p></o:p> Frank Hoffman:  It s kind of a counter-factual, and maybe it s an opportunity for a third book, because I d like to see you do another book.  I ve loved the first two.  But somebody, and maybe somebody in the room will do this in his book did we fight the original campaign the right way and should the center of gravity have been to the left of Baghdad rather than the way we fought the war, kind of following our own paradigms or preferences?  Is that a logical counter-factual to think about?<o:p></o:p> Frederick Kagan:  Frank, I wrote the book actually, it ll be coming out in the spring.<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  Strategically there is that big argument, that if the 4th Infantry Division had come in the way the plan was, through <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Turkey</st1:place></st1:country-region>, and come down through the Sunni area, that there may have been more dislocation of the Sunni forces and therefore less insurgency later.  Coulda, shoulda, woulda.  I don t know how you judge that.<o:p></o:p> Frank Hoffman:  [inaudible]<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  I mean, given that this evolved over time, I don t see who among us would be prescient enough to have come up with an entirely different strategy.  Nor do I see I think it is fair to say that the intelligence community all the intelligence communities, not just ours missed the WMD, for a lot of reasons.  But we may also be missing it the other way with <st1:country-region w:st="on">Iran</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">North Korea</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  Closed societies are tough.<o:p></o:p> But the degree to which the society of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> had fallen apart and the degree to which their infrastructure had fallen apart someone should have raised more of a warning flag about that.  <o:p></o:p> Frederick Kagan:  Bing, since Tom is snitting, I m going to take advantage of this opportunity to wing a question at you.  I m trying to think of the hardest question I can ask you.  I think this will be up there.  You experienced combat in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Vietnam</st1:place></st1:country-region> and you saw in great detail this combat in Fallujah.  You ve seen two entirely different generations of American warriors, one in a conscript army and granted, Marines are not conscripts in quite the same way, even during a conscript period but one in the conscript military and one in a volunteer military.  <o:p></o:p> I d like to ask you to compare those two forces, one that you fought with, one that you watched their fight.<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  You re asking somebody to compare two sons and two daughters.  In <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Vietnam</st1:place></st1:country-region>, we were better looking. [laughter] <o:p></o:p> My heart belongs with the infantry.  The infantry today at the officer level are much better trained.  They think through things much more than we did.  They are much better at applying geometries of fire.  Thank God.  But also the terrain lends itself to that.<o:p></o:p> In the battle for Fallujah, which is extraordinary when you consider it, 10,000 Americans in the battle and not one fatality blue-on-blue.  Now part of that was geometry because it was flat surfaces.  But the other part was that we now have an entire generation that really understand controlling fires in a way that we did not forty years ago.<o:p></o:p> The thing for the future that I think we have to be careful about, I believe that we have driven force protection in war as far as we can possibly can.  We go to extraordinary lengths to protect the individual American or British soldier in battle,remarkable lengths.  We now are wearing 70 pounds of equipment at all times.  <o:p></o:p> These new up-armored Humvees are extraordinary.  I just got a picture back from a lieutenant-colonel yesterday, it was just remarkable.  But it s weight.  It s very, very heavy.  You cannot fight a battle for more than two hours the way we re now sustained.  You have to stop.  We really hydrate like crazy.  Therefore we need vehicles carrying all the gear.  We re no longer infantry as infantry.  We get out and walk but it s a different kind of infantry.<o:p></o:p> The force protection worries me at another level though, and that is if this is as good as you can ever fight a fight without losing people on your own side and we re still saying, Oh my God, look at all the people that are dying if we tangle with somebody so that the casualties start going back up to the level they were in Vietnam or something, we re going to be challenging the cohesiveness of society.<o:p></o:p> Tom Donnelly:  Actually I ve come out of my snit, at least for a moment.  I want to refine the question and ask you if you see a difference between the volunteer force as it was say ten years ago.  One of the questions that always hung over the volunteer force was could it withstand a long war.  What s been remarkable to me has been the resiliency of the force.  We always knew that it was tactically very competent but its previous engagements had been short and fairly decisive campaigns.  <o:p></o:p> Some of the policy decisions about raising the force, about acquiescing in a force that also has families and wives and things like that again, one thing that I seem to see is a hardening.  I don t know how to express it otherwise.  This is not the force that lived in Kasernes in <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Bavaria</st1:place></st1:State>, in some way.  Do you see a distinction between the late Cold War force, the force of the early 1990s, and the force that s out there today?<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  Because they re in different environments, it s hard to make a direct comparison.  The Army now has a policy of 12-13 month rotation.  The Marines have a seven-month rotation.  The Army says you don t have to go back as often.  On balance, I believe that the Marine is the better system.  But both of the systems face a challenge over the next couple of years which is twofold.  For the troops it is always the mission.  The troops just don t spend time talking about politics.  What troops ever did?  <o:p></o:p> By the way, this is really the electronic generation of troops.  When you go back to the hooches, they look like a combination of Radio Shack and <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Circuit</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">City</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>.  Every group has their stereos, they have their Walkmans, they have their Play Stations, and they have the TV that plays the DVDs and they may have a hundred DVDs that they re swapping back and forth.  The degree to which they still like to play war is startling.<o:p></o:p> But they are mission-specific.  What drives them is the mission.  I think what all the commanders have to be watching over the next couple of years is if you re going to be sending them to Iraq, give them a mission so that at the end of that seven months or the end of that twelve months they can say, I achieved something.  I made a difference.  So they don t perceive that they re just on a treadmill.  I think that s a big one.<o:p></o:p> The other big one that everyone is now seeing is that the parents are more and more an impediment to the young men entering the service.  Especially if it s the Marines or the Airborne.  You can understand that.  I m going to go into the Marines.  Why are you going to go into the Marines?<o:p></o:p> So you re getting more of that than in the past.  That gets to the whole question of what do we as a society think about fighting wars when we re always 50 percent opposed to the wars.<o:p></o:p> Peter Shutley:  I m Peter Shutley from the Brookings Institution.  I wonder if you could extrapolate beyond Fallujah and answer this question.  To what extent do our tactics that we use in Fallujah and elsewhere win us support from the people in the rest of the country that may be sitting on the fence or not knowing where to go?  Are they for us or against us because of the way we re fighting there?<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  Among the Sunnis, I think it s a negative by definition of an occupation.  The preferred tactic is the night raid when you have a specific building.  Well, you have a specific building, what are your chances of finding somebody in there who s a bad guy, one in four?  One in two, one in four?  <o:p></o:p> So you re going to be antagonizing people constantly as the outsider.  Even if not one shot is being fired.  You ve come in there at three o clock in the morning as though you have a right to go into somebody else s house.  Conversely, if you re fighting a war, that s what you re going to do.  So as long as we re put into that kind of a situation, I think on balance it s a negative, not a positive.  I don t have a solution for it.<o:p></o:p> Peter Shutley:  What about the Shi as, Sunnis, that may be sitting on the fence, and the Kurds?<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  The only measure I suppose you have there is that still the number of volunteers exceeds the number of slots.  So it s not a manpower it s not persuading people to volunteer for the Iraqi army, even with these terrible suicide bombs.<o:p></o:p> Larry Taylor:  Larry Taylor, retired Marine.  You mentioned the president s recent speech, back to the strategic level.  To what degree are our problems related to the fact that it took four years for the president to identify the enemy specifically, especially in light of the fact that organizations such as AEI and other folks have been writing and talking about the enemy and identified him as the president recently did for a decade or more.<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  I really believe that we, over time, greatly underestimated the severity of the threat that faces us.  We re facing some really tough, dedicated killers.  We are.  The degree to which evil begets evil I was astonished.  I watched Fallujah disintegrate before my eyes from last April through August.  It was amazing.  There was this colonel there by the name of Colonel Suleiman.  He was a tough guy.  He had the local force.  He basically said, Look, I don t want to have much to do with you Americans.  I don t want to have anything to do with these foreign fighters.   <o:p></o:p> So there was this colonel by the name of Tulan and he and Tulan got along well, so Tulan said, I tell you what.  I ll give you what you need and I ll stay out of your way.   Suleiman said, Fine, that way I m not betraying my own people.  But I m not going to have anything to do with the Zarqawis.   <o:p></o:p> Well, inside town we began to get more and more complaints that there were more and more kidnappings.  At one point they got so they actually had an actuary who was saying how much you needed to ransom the average truck driver, a truck driver from Jordan, a truck driver that belonged to a large firm.  They had a scale and it started at $5,000 and made its way up well over $50,000.  Then when Zarqawi moved in, we began to hear more and more about people being tortured and murdered, and you couldn t ransom them once Zarqawi got their hands on them.  Then you got a lot of middlemen who were offering to free people when they were captured, before Zarqawi got them.  <o:p></o:p> Suleiman said, Look, you got to understand, this is a whole network that you re dealing with here.   They all know each other.  Then he made the mistake of they slapped around one of his guys.  He made the mistake of believing them when they said come down to the mosque and we ll talk about it.  He went there and they were beating him up.  But they beat you by strapping you down and hitting the soles of your feet so that you are permanently crippled later, but you re still alive.  But he was a real tough guy and he began to scream back at them, and so it escalated from there.  They finally beheaded him.  <o:p></o:p> Zarqawi gradually in that town he didn t live there he gradually became the number one in the group because of ruthlessness.  Then Janabi had been in charge, and Janabi had been dealing with us he was the imam but he was losing power to a fellow by the name of Hadid who came out of nowhere.  He lived in the poorer section of town.  He got into a couple of firefights and he managed to survive them, which made him a legend.  But then they suspected that what the Americans were doing was giving GPS to some people to carry into town to find out where the terrorist houses were, and click it so you knew where to drop the bomb.  <o:p></o:p> So at random they began to pick people up on the street that was near a terrorist house and then beat them.  It wasn t the most sophisticated way of getting information, the poor guys knew nothing.  They just happened to be walking by.  Then it escalated from there that Hadid became very expert at torturing people terribly.  Within a month, Hadid became Zarqawi s right-hand man.  <o:p></o:p> When the city was taken in November, we found 17 torture houses.  A lot of the houses were destroyed, but physically went into 17 different houses where they had yuck stuff all over the place.  Not getting into the detail about it, I do a little bit in the book in a couple places.  Seventeen houses.  I estimated when I was going through, because they were scattered, it was about one for every two blocks, a torture house.<o:p></o:p> This one place, there was a Ferris wheel and an octopus ride that the kids were taking.  This lieutenant colonel said, You got to look at this, sir.   We went right next to the mosque and it was awful in this one place.  The stench of death just hangs on your clothes forever.  But I realized what was strange about this was I could still see in this room.  I realized it was because there was this window.  I looked out the window and I was looking at the Ferris wheel and the octopus ride.  <o:p></o:p> I looked at this guy on the ground and his head was back like this, he had died in a paroxysm of screams.  Everyone out there had to be hearing him.  Somehow the situation in the town had come kind of like I don t hear it, doesn t happen, but everyone knew it was happening.<o:p></o:p> So the degree to which evil can genuinely rot people and take over quickly, I found to be astounding.  It was a real warning not just to let these things go.<o:p></o:p> Jim:  Jim [indiscernible].  Question about if there would have been a big difference had there been an early availability of, say, a brigade or two of Iraqis.  As you know there were $97 million or so set aside by Congress in 1998 to train Iraqi forces.  State, CIA didn t want to do it in the north, I think Defense was divided.  In any case there was the whole hassle about Chalabi and the INC or not.  In any case, we went in initially with a handful of trained Iraqis rather than a few thousand.  What difference might it have made I know this is speculative had we been able to have a brigade or more of trained Iraqis going with us from the beginning?<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  Would you be thinking that you d be sending them into the tough Sunni areas right off the bat?<o:p></o:p> Jim:  I know they d be almost all Shi a and Kurds, but that s part of the question.  Would it have helped in the Sunni areas even though they were Shi a and Kurd?<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  Not that much, I don t believe.  There are only 13-16 cities that are the heart of this insurgency.  That s it.  But getting in there is really tough.  It s just going to take a long time.  Because the population is not going to give them up.<o:p></o:p> Frederick Kagan:  Bing, I want to ask you another quick question.  What do you think happened to Zarqawi after we took Fallujah?  Was he there?  Do you have any idea where he went?<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  The rumors that I have is that Zarqawi and Hadid both got out in women s clothing.  Zarqawi has used that several times.  Zarqawi got out pretty early.  A lot of the insurgents for a while were really angry at him, because he had promised that he was going to stay.  Hadid had sworn up and down that he was going to stay until the end and so had Janabi.<o:p></o:p> But in the end, Janabi and Zarqawi ran away, and the only guy who stayed out of the three of them was Hadid.  Hadid was holed up in a very small house down in <st1:place w:st="on">Queens</st1:place>, a bad section of town.  The whole town was named after <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">New York City</st1:place></st1:City> boroughs.  He was down in the <st1:place w:st="on">Queens</st1:place> section.  He shot this Marine that came through the door but he was in such a small room you couldn t get at him, in the back room.  I m convinced he didn t believe anyone would ever search back there.  <o:p></o:p> I looked at this thing and I thought, how the heck did the Marines go into this particular room?  It was in between two buildings so you couldn t move tanks in.  He killed Lance Corporal Dessiato when he came through the door.  Then the next Marine through the door was thrown back by the bullets, but he wasn t killed.  He was a tough kid by the name of Timmy Connors.  So Timmy pulled a grenade to throw it in, and Timmy said as he went to throw his grenade into the room, Hadid stepped out and threw his grenade.  So Hadid didn t lack for guts.  <o:p></o:p> Both grenades went over each other.  Timmy was knocked down and that s all he remembered.  When he came to, it was thick dust.  He didn t know where the insurgents were, he wanted to get the hell out of there, but he wasn t sure which way to go.  Then over his PRR his small radio he s hearing, Oh my God, they ve killed Timmy!   He said, Shut the hell up, they ve haven t killed me, get me the hell out of here!   He said his best friend came in and he was firing one shot at a time to keep the insurgents back.  So Timmy said, I ll pay for all your f-ing ammunition, just get me out of here!  Put it on automatic!   He finally put it on automatic, they got him out.  They went running back to the rest of the platoon.  He was twenty, I think he had just turned twenty.  <o:p></o:p> Connors was the squad leader and he d been with the unit for two years.  He looked around and he told me he said he said, Sir, I couldn t take those kids back with me.   Kids, he s talking about nineteen, he s twenty.  So he took the five corporals and the five corporals went back into that house.  They fought in the dark for about three to four hours and they couldn t get them out.  Then the body disappeared.  They could see the body and then they couldn t.  They came back out and reported to the staff sergeant, The body s gone.   <o:p></o:p> That was their greatest fear, that you d end up with a repeat of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Somalia</st1:country-region></st1:place> with the body dragged through the streets.  The staff sergeant said, It can t be, you ve got to get it.   They went back and a tank came up and just rammed the side of the house, because they couldn t shoot it from the angles they were at.  <o:p></o:p> So Connors ran up and banged on the tank with his pistol and shook his head, because he said if the body was in there, he didn t want to have the body crushed, because he wanted to bring the body home.  So then he took his pistol and he shot where he wanted a round put through.  They put a round through the wall and they put a Marine looking down through where the round had gone, and the round doesn t explode in the room.  There s too much velocity, it just went through.  Then he kept the fire while the other three corporals went in the door and killed Hadid and three others that were inside the room.  That was how Hadid died.<o:p></o:p> But the other two got out and there was a lot of resentment against them for a while, but there isn t now.  The jihadist movement is based on a belief that the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> sooner or later will just give up.  Their model is totally <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Vietnam</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  They talk to each other all the time about that.<o:p></o:p> Tom Donnelly3:  What I m interested to know just a little bit is how the Zarqawi operation works as an organization.  What do we know at the tactical level?  Obviously these guys are people we should respect, tough guys, and adaptive enemies, to use the favorite term of art.  But what do we see when we look at the enemy by way of order of battle and the way they command and all that stuff, in a tactical sense?<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  Zarqawi has a good network.  So does Janabi have a good network.  It s among the tribes.  They know certain people they can trust.  This is the first insurgency that I can see that has been based on the car.  No one walks.  No one walks in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  Everyone drives.  They will drive 60 to 200 kilometers in a day.  Until we figure out a way of handling that, you re fighting a different kind of insurgency.  So they have safe houses that are scattered 30 to 60 kilometers apart.  He s a master of using disguises and he does not travel with a large retinue.  He generally keeps his two cars pretty far apart, if he has two.  He won t put them both together.<o:p></o:p> Janabi is the same way.  They know people that they can trust and that really are with them and will remain with them.  They re always moving, they never stay too long.  But they re always worried about ODA, because our people are pretty good.  They re always worried, when s ODA going to catch up with them next?  It s a cat and mouse game that they re playing.<o:p></o:p> Question:  ODA?<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  Operational Detachment Alpha, it s our Special Forces guys.  There are a lot of informers.  But many of the Iraqis aren t really good at reading maps.  So you get a lot of general intelligence but you don t get the specific kind of intelligence that you would if somebody lived in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">New York City</st1:place></st1:City> and would say go to <st1:Street w:st="on"><st1:address w:st="on">122nd Street</st1:address></st1:Street>.<o:p></o:p> Tom Ricks:  Tom Ricks from the <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Washington</st1:place></st1:State> Post.  I have a question about the reception your book is getting.  One of the most impressive things about the book is the intensity of the combat it portrays.  Certainly it comes across as the most intense combat <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> forces have had on a sustained basis in decades.  My question has to do with how the American people are seeing that.  What are you finding?  Are you finding an interest in learning more about this?  Do people want to know what actually happened in Fallujah?  Or do you get a sense the American public would rather not know?<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  I don t think it s the latter, Tom, but I don t have the secret for how you even approach somebody or however the system works for marketing books so that people even know, hey, this would be interesting to read just to understand the nature of the combat.  That whole thing baffles me.<o:p></o:p> Question [microphone cuts on and off]:  My name is [indiscernible], I m a Turkish journalist here.  First of all, a quick question about the importance of foreign fighters.  Foreign fighters, volunteers, are they so numerous, or few of them?  Are they more professional or less professional than Iraqi people?  <o:p></o:p> The second one is that before the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> invasion, we didn t know about this Sunni population, they were so Islamist or jihadist.  They were mainly secular-minded people.  How is this quick transformation possible?  I m working on Islamist movement and I know that becoming an Islamist politically [inaudible] is not so easy.  But in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> they are talking about a real jihad.  I am still wondering about the real state of Islamism.<o:p></o:p> The last one, using the concept of Sunni [inaudible] I think that there is a big problem here.  I am from <st1:country-region w:st="on">Turkey</st1:country-region>, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Turkey</st1:country-region></st1:place> is mainly Sunni [inaudible] country.  We don t have so much [inaudible].  Every time people are using the concept of Sunni [inaudible] under Khomeini.  <o:p></o:p> It was the same thing for Shi a.  Shi a was revolutionary [inaudible] Shi a became ally of the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> [inaudible].  The Sunni became the enemy and revolutionary, radical and [inaudible].<o:p></o:p> So I think especially people from the Sunni [inaudible] like mine, there s a big question.  This [inaudible] the kind of [inaudible] you are pushing a little bit [inaudible] radicals.<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  The first question, foreign fighters.  What, maybe 8 percent?  A small percentage.  More willing to die.  You can tell on a battlefield very quickly who wants to stick it out with you and who doesn t.  Most of what you encounter on a battlefield is what I call shoot and scoot.   Somebody would take a couple shots at you, then they ll be gone.  They can live to shoot another day.  Then there are the others who dig in somewhere.  As I said, after Fallujah they don t do it as much.  But who dig in, like Hadid did, and say come and get me.  They tend to be more the foreign fighters.<o:p></o:p> The whole phenomenon of the Sunnis is just a fact of life in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  The first fact of life is that for several hundred years they dominated the country although they were a minority.  The second fact of life is when you ve dominated a country for quite some time, you don t willingly give up dominating.  So I could be using the words [indiscernible] or whatever.  If you give any group that is a minority the power over the majority in a country, because they were the favored of the tyrant who was in charge of the country, then you pull all that power away, they re not going to like that.  That s the situation you have with the Sunnis in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  <o:p></o:p> What I indicated about jihad slowly creeping in there is really different than two years ago.  My evidence is anecdotal but it s anecdotal on the battlefield on who s yelling at you.  So it s more and more there is this relationship between the jihad and those who are willing to shoot and die.  As opposed to, say, a secular party like the Ba athists.<o:p></o:p> Frederick Kagan:  First of all, it s a very good point.  I certainly am too loose with the abbreviation.  When I say Sunni in this regard, I mean first of all Sunni Arab, because of course the Kurds are also there are also a lot of Sunni Kurds, and they re not the problem for the most part.  Second of all, I mean Iraqi.  So it s only in this context, and I understand it can get to be very loose in the way that we toss it around.  But I totally understand where you re coming from.  I think we all understand that this is a shorthand that we re using that s potentially a problem.<o:p></o:p> I d like to suggest there s another factor that we need to take into consideration.  It s not just that we removed the Sunnis from power.  We decapitated the Iraqi Sunni community, because the leadership of that community had been the Ba ath Party and it had been focused on Saddam.  When we removed Saddam from power and took the Ba athists out, we also destroyed the leadership of that community.  <o:p></o:p> I think one of the things that we re seeing, there was a brief moment when we sort of tried to turn to the local sheikhs, but I think to the extent the sheikhs had power, they had been incorporated probably into the Ba ath Party, we probably removed most of the powerful ones anyway.  I think one of the things you re seeing with the imams and the power that they re getting is they re stepping into a power vacuum.  So I wonder how deep the religiosity is necessarily among the so-called jihadists who are part of this and how much you have young men who are appealing to the only figures in their community who are actually stepping up into a leadership role.<o:p></o:p> Tom Donnelly:  I don t want to repeat what I said earlier, but to me I commend to everybody to read the full text of the Zawahiri letter.  It ranks right up there with the discovery of Lee s Order 191 prior to <st1:place w:st="on">Antietam</st1:place>, to use an American analogue.  It s clear from his point of view that the primary struggle for the jihadists is over <st1:place w:st="on">Arabia</st1:place>.  He regards even other Sunni-majority countries throughout the Islamic world as strategically secondary to the struggle over Arabia, of which obviously <st1:country-region w:st="on">Iraq</st1:country-region> is central or as important as <st1:country-region w:st="on">Egypt</st1:country-region> or <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Syria</st1:country-region></st1:place> or any other place.  <o:p></o:p> Just in terms of the way the enemy sees the war, it is first and foremost a struggle for and the heart of what they see as the caliphate to come is centered on <st1:place w:st="on">Arabia</st1:place>.  That is why, again in their mind, <st1:country-region w:st="on">Iraq</st1:country-region> is more important than <st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region> or <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Turkey</st1:country-region></st1:place> or really any other part of the Islamic world.<o:p></o:p> Michael Lewis:  Michael Lewis, BB&T Capital Markets.  I would be interested in your opinion.  It sounds like training seems to be one of the most important drivers for our troops in their operations in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> at this time.  But how important are some of the higher-end intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technologies that have come to the battlefield in today s war-fighting effort?  Is that something you saw as an important trend to help our troops in their efforts against the insurgency?<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with infrared is astonishing.  I mean, just astonishing.  Night after night you can hear it, by the way.  It sounds like an annoying mosquito up there.  I ve had Marines say, I don t go to sleep until I can hear it.  You cannot avoid it.  If you are giving off heat and you are outside, you re going to be seen at night.  It s that cut and dry.<o:p></o:p> The other new system out there it s not a new one, but they ve put them together this AC-130 is the single most devastating weapon on the battlefield, probably including the tank.  It s astonishing, because it can hover and it has a cannon on board.  When it sees you, it sees you.  It s looking right at you when it shoots.  <o:p></o:p> So the combination of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, the infrared and the AC-130 aircraft at night which sounds like a huge washing machine that s just over your head at all times that has really changed the nature of any battlefield at night.  I think that will be with us for the I don t see that changing.<o:p></o:p> The next huge step forward that I would argue for is some way of knowing if a human being is inside a concrete building.  There are ways maybe that they ll get to that extent.  So you don t have to go room by room saying knock, knock, who s there?<o:p></o:p> Christian Lowe:  Christian Lowe from Marine Corps Times.  I was struck by your story about your most recent visit to Fallujah, where you talked about going to the market and some of the I think it was Iraqi soldiers who couldn t get their hair cuts because they were afraid of being assassinated?  I read your book, and I m wondering what are your personal impressions on the overall success or failure of the Marine Corps operation in Fallujah, and what s your evaluation of the success or failure of the tactics the Marine Corps used in their battle for Fallujah in November.  <o:p></o:p> I actually spoke with Lieutenant Ackerman as well and he was talking about watching one of his platoon commander buddies running up the streets tossing grenades into every house and kind of yelling at each other, urging each other on.  There was a lot of destruction and a lot of criticism that leveling the city created more enemies than it did just other people saying this.  I m wondering both tactically and strategically, what s your evaluation of the success or failure of that operation?<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  I came back and shows you what happens when you get older and urged that we find ways of knocking down more buildings because I don t equate any building with a human life.  That s why I said, if there s any way of knowing if somebody s inside a building or something before you go in, I d like to know it and then just take the building down.  <o:p></o:p> The tactics that the Marines used, as I indicated, that was the first time I ever saw 10,000 people on a battlefield and didn t have one friendly/unfriendly fatality.  I find that to be just astonishing with the amount of firepower.  Twenty-six hundred tank rounds were fired, for instance.  That s just astounding that that happened.  So the way they plotted the geometries of fire of that battle, I think that s a textbook of how to do it.<o:p></o:p> The other thing that happened in that battle, that the Army and the Marines really got together.  I watched the Army and the Marines when they didn t want to have a lot to do with each other throughout history.  This time you actually had the armored battalions of the Army working with the infantry battalions of the Marine Corps.  One would say that s only common sense.  Well, it may be only common sense but it s taken us about fifty years to get there.  <o:p></o:p> So at the tactical level, it was a success.<o:p></o:p> Did it change attitudes in any way among the Sunnis?  I d say no.  So the issue of, are there still insurgents in Fallujah, the answer is of course.  Not nowhere near as many, so you ve changed the nature of the combat in terms of the scale.  But that s all the American forces can do.  We can be this pressure cap so that anytime the insurgents get at the squad level or platoon level which is practically unheard of, you practically never hear of a platoon of insurgents fighting together.  So you can keep a lid on how they can fight and that s, by the way, what the Iraqi army is now starting to do with the Marines, starting in Fallujah and other places.  They re beginning to partner.  They too can do the same thing there.<o:p></o:p> But what happens down here?  That has to be the next step.  That has to do with the constitution.  That has to do with proffering some way that the Sunnis are part of the solution.  But I also believe it s going to have to do with an awful lot of good police work.  That s going to be awfully tough.  The difference between the police and the army is the army instinctively moves everywhere with at least four vehicles and sixteen people.  <o:p></o:p> That s automatic.  It s automatically ingrained in us, it s automatically ingrained in the Iraqi army.  We don t automatically think of the police moving somewhere in those kind of large scale.  When you try to scale a problem, we re used to seeing police two in a squad car.  Ain t ready for two in a squad car in many of those Sunni cities.  They d be gobbled up.<o:p></o:p> So we can keep this lid on it.  The next step of the police is where there has to be great improvement.<o:p></o:p> Philip Sherwill:  Philip Sherwill from the Sunday Telegraph.  I missed the start, so apologies if you ve addressed this.  With the vote on Saturday and the elections in December, we seem to be seeing however reluctantly some of the Sunni Ba athist types who are associated with the insurgency coming somewhere into the electoral process.  I just wonder how much yourself you think there may be a narrowing of the insurgency to the sort of jihadis rather than the Ba athists as well.<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  I think it s too early to tell.  I really do.  By December, I think you have a little bit of a better grasp on that one.  I was over there in September, there were so many wild rumors, you could just pick and choose.  Were some of the insurgents going to come over?  Were others going to try to car bomb everybody?  It was just too wild.  I think we re going to have to give it several months and let the facts on the ground dictate.  I don t think anyone can predict right now out of this.<o:p></o:p> Greg Grand:  Greg Grand, Defense News.  I d be curious to know how you think Fallujah influences our notions of how wars will be fought and how we should construct a force.  During the 1990s, all you heard was precision-guided munitions and Revolution in Military Affairs.  Has our paradigm, has our thinking of warfare changed, where this close battle, this notion, becomes much more important in the way we shape our forces and doctrine and training?<o:p></o:p> Frederick Kagan:  We planted that as the perfect last question.<o:p></o:p> Bing West:  I believe General Mattis, who was in charge of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, really believes that.  General Petraeus, I don t know.  I ll just have to wait and see because I haven t had a chance to talk to him.  The nature of the terrain when you look at it, if you believe we re going to be engaged again anywhere in the Greater Middle East, and practically every other place now is urban-based.  Even if you go back to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Vietnam</st1:place></st1:country-region> today, which I did two years ago, I had a hard time finding my old village because the demographics of the world have changed so much that over 50 percent of the entire population now live in cities.  So by definition of the demographics, yes, Fallujah has to be taken into account by any sensible planner.<o:p></o:p> The other aspect is the nature of the buildings.  They re all concrete.  You consider that.  That s like saying you have 30,000 pillboxes in a city.  So you better take that into account.  What did we discover in Fallujah?  The way you had to do it was bring up the tank.  The other thing we discovered is that the tank will be with us for a long, long time.  Then the infantry has to still do it.  We did neglect I swear, for ten years we neglected the infantry.  Now we ve kind of rediscovered them.<o:p></o:p> But the one thing I wish we would rediscover more than anything else is that 70 percent of the infantry soldiers in the Army and the Marine Corps get out after four years.  Just think of that.  What do we have to do as a country to somehow reward them so that we continue to get the kind of guys we re getting now?  Of all the things, that s the one that worries me looking down the road.  Who wants to be in the infantry in the future?  Right now we still have them, as we showed in Fallujah.  But if 70 percent of those guys are getting out after four years and we say thanks a lot there s really nothing else there.  You know the way they used to get rewarded in our society was you basically said, Oh, you fought in <st1:place w:st="on">Iwo Jima</st1:place>?  Wow, you fought in <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Normandy</st1:place></st1:State>?  Wow.  Will we be saying that about the guys who fought in Fallujah?  Well, it s our country.<o:p></o:p> Frederick Kagan:  Thanks for your book and the movie, maybe.<o:p></o:p> Tom Donnelly:  Let s declare victory, let s sign Bing up for AEI s Landpower Project.  And let s give Bing a well-earned round of thanks.<o:p></o:p> [End of transcript]<o:p></o:p></body></html>